B.J. Best, Perfect Dark
Phebe Davidson, The Longing for Liver Sausage
Adam Peterson, We Have Improved Our Recommendations to Serve You Better
Drew Blanchard, Strange Weather in Kelly Magee'sBody Language
VOLUME 31.1
Feature
B.J. Best: Interview, Artitst's Statement and selections from But Our Princess is in Another Castle
Poetry
B.J. Best
Perfect Dark
Super Mario Brothers
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Rad Racer
Sinistar
Danielle Cadena Deulen
For My Sister in the River
Phebe Davidson
The Longing for Liver Sausage
Jaswinder Bolina
When My Father Dead I Wish Spokane
Glenda Melvin Cassutt
The Smell of Wet Wool
Gunter Kunert
Last Day in the Garden
Sleepless
Ken Meisel
Watching JoJo Dance, at the Sunset Strip
Marie C. Jones
dog days and a touch of ruins
Dilruba Ahmed
Jinn
Witching Hour
Chuck Freeland
Aria
Gregory Nicolai
Sad Animals
Jennifer Perrine
In Praise of the Myoclonic Jerk
Christina Olson
Poem Written After an Hour-Long Road Trip to Darwin, MN, Home of the World's Largest Ball of Twine Rolled by One Man
Stephanie Rogers
Another Way the Body Dies
The Incident When My Dog Dies and/or You Leave Me
Susan Firer
The City of Lake Circle Signs' Small Tornadoes
Jesse Lichtenstein
Four Parts
Claudia Grinell
The Split Infinitive
Thylias Moss
The Culture of Extended Glass
Anne Keefe
Fugit Amor
R. Virgil Ellis
You Forge
Doug Ramspeck
Retirement Years
Esther Lee
Dear ___________abled
Dead ___________ology
Sarah Pemberton Strong
Why I Learned the Trade
Melissa Fredericks
How to Make an Exit (Choose One)
Chad Davidson
Astricide
Cassandra
Kimberly White
castles
Sonia Greenfield
Washing the Saucepans-The Moon Glows on Her Hands In the Shallow River
Fiction
Rex Myers
The Last New Job in Grier, North Dakota
Joshua Weber
Bentley
Stacy M. Tintocalis
Iron
Tom Miller
How to Tell the Brick Joke, in 12 Parts
Ellen McKnight
The Achievement
Denial
J. Duncan Wiley
A Crush in the Cosmic Long-term
Kate Milliken
Bottleneck
Adam Peterson
We Have Improved Our Recommendations to Serve You Better
Carrie Messenger
International Women's Day
Annam Manthiram
Thathaka Boothaka
Christine Sneed
The Virginity of Famous Men
Creative Nonfiction
Stephen Lawrence
Inheriting Absence
Myfanwy Collins
"Don't Mess with Texas"
Interviews
Dawn Tefft
The Art of Origami: An Interview with Jonathan Safran Foer
Jen Collins and Kristin Terwelp
Exploited Wilderness, Baseball and Beatrice: Bowering on Writing
Book Reviews
Sheila Roberts
In Fragments: A Reading of Ben Oswest's The New Suffolk Hymnbook
Suzanne Heagy
Narrative Collisions in Ivan Stavan's The Disappearance
Drew Blanchard
Strange Weather: A Review of Kelly Magee's Body Language
Perfect Darkby B.J. Best
We love our crooked minds, but find them unmappable, terra incognita. The rain is eating away the stone. Our clothes do not match our bodies.
We rummage for any apt metaphor. Perhaps it is seeing through many walls, in heat-vision, the others running down angular hallways. Perhaps it is setting up a thought that will obliterate all thoughts that come thereafter. Perhaps it is crisp electricity in your hand, ten poison-tipped knives, the recoil of a silver revolver.
It is none of these things.
We do, however, know how to kill people, and lustily so: their flesh is fodder for our love. We are drastically efficient; no remorse is needed for those hapless cartographers.
You find a crate of neutron bombs and lob one into a small room. It is perfect. There is a flash and an ineffable electronic sound: it sucks every energy inward, an amorphous black sphere. The others stumble, are dizzy and blurred, gasp and fall to the ground. You throw another and the dense nebula grows. You cackle, feverishly pitching another and another, and then: an artful stroll amidst the buzzing darkness.
The Longing for Liver Sausage by Phebe Davidson
A smell. A stink. An odor of sausages and sauerkraut underlying the whole block of flats. I smell the things I have always smelled, the onions sometimes more, sometimes less. Two years I have been lying here, rolled in a rug we got from my mother's mother—good Belgian wool—a little worn, fringe almost gone. Strong colors. Wines mostly. Not so nice now, with the cooking smell, the seepage of liquids from under lids, at first, then out of unexpected places. Finally just everything. The ooze of discoloration. The wools are darker now. As if a child had spilled—no, forgotten maybe—the package it was supposed to put away, wrapped in plain brown butcher paper inside a tablecloth. The old one we used in the kitchen, stained long before the package it was wrapped around. Meat, bone, cartilage, hair. Offal. The rug rolled around it all. A corpus of desire. The truth? I always hated this place. My father. My husband. Now the girl refusing to leave. The neighborhood drawing in on itself, collapsing in winter dusk, the longing for liver sausage.
We Have Improved Our Recommendations to Serve You Better by Adam Peterson
Kelcore Deluxe Toaster (red)
This toaster would go great with the Electrochromatic High-8 Speed Blender (red) that you have in your shopping cart. It features two slots (yes, it does handle bagels!) and a six setting temperature gauge that runs the gamut from toast to toaster pastry with just a turn of the dial. If you would like bagels or toast or toaster pastries or toaster waffles to go along with this magnificent triumph of modern appliance engineering just visit our grocery section and forget about the expiring food they have at the convenience store across the street.
Ultra-Wake Digital Alarm Clock
With the Comfosoft foam pillow you just purchased (only one?) you might have problems waking up in the morning, but rest assured even the famed Sleepineers at Comfosoft get to work on time thanks to the piercing shriek of this frequency attuned alarm clock that guarantees you’ll be on time for work or your money back. Wake up early, shave before you get in the car, eat a healthy breakfast, and that jerk who sits in the cubicle next to you won’t even get a chance to joke about bags under your eyes.
Harmonica in the Key of C
Your purchase of blues records suggests long forgotten dreams of harmonica-blowing superstardom which, with this lovely and tuneful number, may not be so far out of reach after all. Brushed steel surrounds howling reeds for a deep, dare we say (we dare!) gutsy tone. Learn to play with any number of our fascinating and in-depth guides and it might make you forget about how your father, the drunk, used to spend all of his time listening to his 33s instead of spending time with you and your sister. Of course, if you are looking to supplement his collection, or maybe are just looking for inspiration, stop by our record store to find that lost Sonny Boy Williamson record. Better yet, check out our extensive collection of new releases, throw away the record player, meet a girl, fall in love, forget about the blues, and buy a house from our realty department.
Ernest Scared Stupid
Gag parties have always made us feel slightly uncomfortable, too, but feel happy because we have a perfect selection of bad movies, bad books, bad hats, and completely worthless and confusing appliances for all of your gag party needs. If it was up to us—and it never is, is it?—we would never throw a gag party like the one your sister is throwing, but this year you can come prepared with an instant classic gift. Can Ernest (Jim Varney in his 6th to last performance as Ernest) save Halloween before the troll monster thing turns all of the children into wooden idols? Who cares when something is so instantaneously campy? And if you buy yourself a copy, you can set it next to your ugly lamp and it will be ironic. If you watch it one night, if you worry about the kids, if you wish you could find a girl like Ernest did, you can call that ironic too and it will be if you buy vintage clothes from our auction market. The movie comes with an extra-outrageous cover wherein Ernest looks scared (make a joke about how he is really scared that he is still making these movies and you might impress the dark-haired wallflower type at your sister’s party.)
Jo Thoreau and the Shaken Babies—Everything after You Left
This album, the second release by Cleveland’s Jo Theroux and the Shaken Babies, builds on the promise of the only sporadically selling first record. We told you to listen to more contemporary music and so it comes as no surprise to us that you are back to look at hip indie bands because the girl at your sister’s party could not care less about the blues or your harmonica. That she was oddly interested in Ernest (Jim Varney 1949-2000), which went over like gangbusters—you’re welcome—is somewhat confusing but nothing we cannot deal with: buy our Ernest box set and mention that the man who plays the Chief in Ernest Goes to Camp is the crying Indian from that litter PSA who appeared in over a hundred films as a Native Person but was, in the end, Italian. Watch her anemic, vegan eyes light up behind those black plastic frames at the nugget. For more trivia ideas see our book section, or, if you think you are up to it, head over to our game section and try your luck right now at one of six different difficulty levels (we think you should probably not try anything above level two).
One Dozen Roses (Red)
Nothing says love like one of our hand-selected bouquets of beautiful, blooming long-stemmed roses that come complete with Baby’s Breath garnishing the rubescent Ecuadorian blossoms. Shipped directly from the grower to your love’s door in one of our specially designed gift boxes, these flowers are sure to win the heart of your sister’s friend even if the date you went on was only okay, but not great. Perhaps next time you should have a picnic or a romantic dinner at home instead of going to a restaurant without a vegan menu, or, if she’ll give you a second date, stop by our local restaurant guide and find the perfect location for a romantic, meat and milk-free meal. In the mean time, call your sister and ask for her address and send her these flowers today! They come with a personalized greeting, but let us handle that.
20x-80x Zoom Binoculars
You know why.
The rest
of the story is printed in issue 31.1. Subscribe today.
Strange Weather in Kelly Magee's Body Language
by Drew Blanchard
The characters in Kelly Magee’s debut collection of short fiction, Body Language, are not all good. In fact, many of them are thieves, vandals, perverts, and murderers. These characters steal money from a blind man, burn down houses, throw rocks at an obese man as he hikes down the Grand Canyon, and slip mickeys to unsuspecting women in bars. In the hands of a lesser writer, these desperate, sometimes brutal characters would be unlikable, but in the well crafted and always surprising stories in Body Language, Kelly Magee gives everyone the humanity they deserve. To say these fine stories are tied together, made whole solely through bad people doing bad things would not be true; instead, these stories are connected through Magee’s wisdom and empathy for all of her characters, both good and bad. And one of the pleasures of this collection is the many and varied voices and places Magee takes the reader. Like the Tilt o’Whirl in the title story “Body Language,” we are sent spinning from tale to tale, but unlike the nail that bends, setting the safety bar loose from Lucha and her father—only gravity holding them down—the reader will always feel safe in the sure hands of Kelly Magee.
One of the reasons the reader feels so secure in these stories—along with the empathy and intelligence she bestows on her characters—is Magee’s precise judgment of emotional distance. In each story, whether in first, second, or third person, she zooms in and out skillfully, locating the reader in the perfect position to experience each story with clarity; she offers intimacy when fitting and detachment when necessary. The second story in the collection, “All The America You Want,” is a terrific story and an excellent example of Magee offering a close-up view of her protagonist. We see the world of this story through the eyes of Emilia Esposito, or “Em.” And Magee, through Em, explores the problems of urban renewal in South Tampa, Florida, a renewal that blindly and carelessly causes displacement of its residents. We see the working class residents sitting on lawn chairs in parking lots drinking Miller Lite, watching the destruction of their small apartments and the building of Babylon. In this story, Babylon takes shape in the form of a large house being built in front of one of the last, still-standing apartments—an enormous yellow house the homeless and soon-to-be-ousted residents call the “Sun House.”
The rest of the review is printed in issue 31.1. Subscribe today.
